There may soon be a rainbow flag emoji
Your devices could soon be getting an extra emoji added to their keyboards.
Unicode Consortium, the organization tasked with overseeing the creation of new emoji characters, may soon add support for a rainbow flag emoji. Unlike other new emoji, the rainbow flag could be added to Unicode's offerings independently of the official update next year.
The idea for the rainbow flag emoji was first floated in 2015 when Unicode updated its emoji for skin tone variations, but wasn't included despite "strong vendor support," according to a letter released Tuesday from Mark Davis, one of Unicode's cofounders. In the letter, Davis lays out a method that allows vendors to add the new emoji using existing characters.
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The method, illustrated below, essentially combines the existing flag and rainbow characters. "Because existing Unicode characters are used, vendors can begin design and implementation work now and can deploy before the end of 2016, rather than waiting for Unicode v10.0 to come out in June of 2017," Davis explains.
It will still be up to Google, Apple and others to add the rainbow flag to their emoji offerings.
Davis, who also works for Google, was part of the team that proposed 13 new emoji characters representing working women. Unicode agreed to add 11 of the characters last week.
There's no timeline yet on when those characters will be available, but the next wave of emoji (which includes 72 new characters) was released last month. Twitter has already adopted the new symbols -- which include characters for selfies, avocado and bacon -- and more platforms will likely be adding support for them in the coming weeks and months.
h/t: BuzzFeed
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Karissa was Mashable's Senior Tech Reporter, and is based in San Francisco. She covers social media platforms, Silicon Valley, and the many ways technology is changing our lives. Her work has also appeared in Wired, Macworld, Popular Mechanics, and The Wirecutter. In her free time, she enjoys snowboarding and watching too many cat videos on Instagram. Follow her on Twitter @karissabe.
